By Tom Breihan on October 8, 2010 at 5:20 p.m. EDT

-- Minus Sound Research is a collective of North Carolina visual artists and musicians. This month, Minus Sound celebrates its fifth anniversary with a show at Carrboro'sCarrboro Arts Center, featuring art from members of Superchunk, Kingsbury Manx, Bowerbirds, the Moaners, and other bands. On opening parties October 8 and 9, a number of bands will play, including Kingsbury Manx, the Moaners, and a reunited Shark Quest.

-- Veteran rapper/producers Alchemist and Oh No have teamed up to form a new duo called Gangrene, and they'll release Gutter Water, their first album, November 9 on Decon. Raekwon, Guilty Simpson, MED, and Fashawn are among the guests.

-- Emil Amos, drummer for the experimental doom metal bands Om and Grails, also records solo music as Holy Sons. On October 12, Partisan will release his new album Survivalist Tales.

By Tom Breihan on July 30, 2009 at 10:55 a.m. EDT

By Tom Breihan on January 9, 2009 at 11:35 a.m. EST

According to the band's publicist (they have a publicist!), the long-whispered-about doom-metal supergroup Shrinebuilder is totally going to happen! They're recording an album and everything! This is so awesome.

The band's absurd lineup: Saint Vitus/Obsessed/Spirit Caravan/Hidden Hand guitar hero Scott "Wino" Weinrich, gigantic Neurosis/Tribes of Neurot leader Scott Kelly (pictured), former* Sleep and current Om bassist Al Cisneros, and Melvins drummer Dale Crover. Former Om drummer Chris Hakius was also originally supposed to be involved, but he dropped out around the same time he left Om. And that's fine; we're not about to start complaining about Dale Crover being involved.

Real talk: This is something like a stoner-metal Mount Rushmore, and the album is probably going to make us want to celebrate by going out and killing a lion and then using the lion's skull to make a bong.

Right, the album: The band is scheduled to begin recording this weekend in Los Angeles with producer Toshi Kasai. Kelly's Neurot Recordings is set to release the album this summer. And almost as badass, Kelly has promised to liveblog the recording sessions on his perfectly-named We Burn Through the Night blog. To put things in perspective, a recent entry begins: "I was raised in the corner of the room. Backed up against the wall. Isolated. Tormented. Dominated. Intimidated." If Kelly writes his studio blog like this, we can't hit subscribe fast enough.

In other Neurosis news, the mysterious band will play a can't-miss show in Atlanta on February 28 with Mastodon, Torche, Harvey Milk, and others opening. And they're curating the Beyond the Pale event at the Roadburn festival in Tilburg, Netherlands, on April 25. The Roadburn lineup includes Neurosis themselves, Om, and a Saint Vitus reunion. That's three quarters of Shrinebuilder's lineup right there, so we could be looking forward to a surprise onstage debut, perhaps.